Operators of communication networks face a challenge in how to secure mobile broadband revenues.
The tremendous uptake in mobile broadband subscribers and data volume will require substantial investments in operators' telecom infrastructure. On the other hand, users will expect their operator to deliver the service experience they have paid for. Thus, operator revenues from mobile broadband rely on satisfied customers.
A small fraction of the users generates traffic exceeding those of normal users with magnitude. In many networks, these heavy users are consuming a quite large part of the network resources today. Experience shows that heavy users normally constitutes of 5-10% of the total subscribers, but could consume 70-85% of the network resources. It has been shown that often the heavy users are the biggest consumers of the network resources also during busy hour. With policy control operators can distribute the traffic load more evenly, giving a defined Quality of Service QoS, e.g. more bandwidth resources, for the normal users (the majority of the subscribers), particularly during the busy hour. Policy control also enables operators to push the heavy user traffic into the non-busy hours where number of normal users is lower. For some heavy user applications, time of day is not very critical since they click to download and leave the application running for hours or even days before completing a larger download. Policy control therefore helps controlling network capacity utilization by managing the traffic in a smarter way.
Today and in the future, operators are introducing new premium services, for example ring tones download, TV, video streaming, VoIP, etc. To make sure that the subscribers get the best end user experience while consuming these premium services policy control is used to allocate more bandwidth for these applications when being accessed.
Operators use policy control to move away from a blanket, flat fee for everyone, to the right price for the right service at the right time ensuring users get the user experience paid for. This gives consumers the chance to choose a subscription that best meets their circumstances and decide how to act when the subscription doesn't meet their current, specific needs.
For operators, policy control makes it possible to get the most value from their bandwidth, by leveraging the right price for the right service at the right time.
In order to handle policy control and charging, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project 3GPP has in TS 23.203 specified a policy and charging control PCC functionality encompassing the two main functions:                Flow Based Charging, including charging control and online credit control;        Policy control (e.g. gating control, QoS control, QoS signaling, etc.).        
The PCC functionality is comprised by the functions of the Policy and Charging Enforcement Function PCEF, the Bearer Binding and Event Reporting Function BBERF, the Policy and Charging Rules Function PCRF, the Application Function AF, the Online Charging System OCS, the Offline Charging System OFCS and the Subscription Profile Repository SPR or the User Data Repository UDR.
The PCC architecture extends the architecture of an IP Connectivity Access Network IP-CAN, e.g. GPRS, where the PCEF is a functional entity in the gateway node implementing the IP access to the Packet Data Network PDN.
The PCRF is the part of the network architecture that aggregates information to and from the network supporting the creation of rules and then making policy decisions for subscribers active on the network.
However, the 3GPP PCC architecture does not provide for the OCS to enforce a QoS thereby addressing the need for a solution which ensures that a network traffic policy is applied to the users' traffic, with the policy depending on what service the customer has purchased thereby avoiding congestion in the network.
An example is dividing the level of services into service package products such as “gold” (e.g. 3 Mbps, 10 Gb per month), “silver” (e.g. 512 kbps, 1 Gb per month) and “bronze” subscriptions (e.g. 128 kbps, 500 Mb per month), where at a higher cost, faster service and greater available capacity is provided.
A problem is that frequent changes in network traffic policies impacts network behavior thereby risk causing network instability.